Pastor’s Note

The Gift of Eternity

                It is officially the fourth Sunday of Advent…can you believe it? On this Sunday in the Advent season, we light the Candle of Love, which represents God’s perfect love revealed to us through Jesus Christ. The Candle of Love points to the incarnation, God choosing to take on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ so that we could once again be reconciled with God. The Hebrew word for the incarnation is Emmanuel, and it means “God with us.” It’s the point of the entire Bible and it is so very significant.

You see, there is a huge problem that humanity faces, and it is the problem of sin. When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the beginning of the Book of Genesis, they both simultaneously rejected and rebelled against God and for the very first time in human history, sin entered the world and fractured our relationship with God. It created this huge gap between us and God and the question becomes, “How do we cross this seemingly impassable and impossible gap to be with God once more?” The answer? Jesus Christ.

All throughout human history, every people group has tried to build a bridge back to perfection, back to eternity, back to God. In fact, every major world religion is built on that premise. But the unique claim of Christianity and the Gospel is that God built the bridge from heaven to earth because the gap between us and God was impassable and impossible to cross on our own. You see, we need someone to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and this is exactly why we celebrate Christmas every single year. We celebrate the fact that out of God’s love for us, God built the bridge from heaven to earth by taking on flesh. God sent His one and only Son to this world so that we could be united with God once more. Jesus Christ made it possible to anyone who would believe the gift of salvation. He is the bridge that connects us to God, to eternity, once more.

Friends, I cannot get over the Gospel. I do not have a category in my brain, let alone a language that I can use, to truly convey the overwhelming reality of the incarnation, that God became a man. I cannot wrap my brain around the fact that the same God that created the entire universe, heaven and earth, sky and sea, you and me, is the same God who stepped down off His Royal Throne and was born in a manger, into the messiness of this world. I cannot get over the fact that God would enter into the messiness of my life, die for me, and redeem me so that I could cross the bridge from this temporary dwelling place we call planet earth to my eternal home called heaven. 

The reality is that none of us are worthy of Jesus Christ; we are worthy of condemnation. But by the grace of God, instead, we get to walk on the bridge that leads us to the rest of our lives, to the gift of eternity. 

As we prepare to celebrate the incarnation, may the stable still astonish us this Christmas. May we never get over the fact that the God of the universe loves us so much that He chose to enter this world as a baby wrapped in rags so that we, you and me, could spend eternity with our Heavenly Father.